No really, children are the future, says GeekDad

How do we prepare our children for a world with genetically
modified friends, AI-enhanced competitors, and all of them
interconnected so as to realise an incorporeal hive mind?

Give me a moment while I stop giggling. My faux question assumes
a certain kind of not-so-distant future -- one that is
post-human, where the raw materials in our kids aren't
enough, and so they must be enhanced with smarter-than-human
ingredients.

In my own writings I have thrown cold water on these dystopian
futures. Instead, I have my own vision, and in my telling the main
character in the story of our human future is children's entertainment.

What's so special about children's games and pastimes? They're
special because they possess the two ingredients crucial to human
evolution today: cultural evolution and kids. Let's run through
these two ingredients in turn.

Cultural evolution is the principal evolutionary
mechanism responsible for human advances ever since our ancestors
became Homo sapiens. We may no longer be evolving by
natural selection, but our artefacts are being culturally selected
over time to be tighter fits to our ancient brains.

Children's entertainment is just one of many classes of artefact
being creatively designed by cultural evolution to harness our
brains (others abound, including the arts, fashion, everyday
design, and entertainment generally).

But children's entertainment is especially heavy in the other
key ingredient for post-Darwinian human
evolution: kids. Our brains are teeming with brilliant instincts
we'd like to harness for further human transformation, but
instincts are never born into the world without some learning.

When these two ingredients (cultural selection and children)
mix, the results can be Earth-shaking. For example, writing itself
has these two ingredients: it has culturally evolved over time to
be a good fit for our visual system and it is taught to
our children usually in the guise of entertainment.

Take either the cultural or playful ingredients away, and the
revolutionary power of writing evaporates -- writing that looked
like bar codes would be unlearnable by children, and
brain-optimised writing shapes taught to adults would never become
a transformative power.

Children's games
are no mere games -- they are game changers. In the realm of the
complex evolutionary processes building humans of the future,
children's entertainment is the foremost playing field.